Tag: profit

There is an endless sea of Runescape money making guides available on the internet, but most of them either tell you to gather an expensive item so you run around like an idiot, or worse, require you to have a high level skill and spend an entire afternoon crafting or smithing something. Creating something of value can be fun in real life, but in a game it’s all just mindless clicking so wouldn’t you rather grow your cashpile the easy way? Flipping items for profit is the answer and in this article I will try to explain exactly how it’s done.

Runescape flipping guide

Flipping items is a process where you buy an item at a lower market value and later sell the item at a higher market value, thus making a profit.

For example you buy iron ore at 196 GP each and later sell iron ore at 203 GP each. This way you will earn 7 GP for every iron ore you flip.

If you are having trouble figuring out a good price to choose when buying and selling then I have another great tutorial on how to target what I like to call the “Desperate Buyer”. You can read more about it here: How to flip items on the Grand Exchange

How to find good items to flip on Runescape

Flipping iron ore was just an example and I wouldn’t advise anyone, especially a beginner, to try and flip this item! That’s because the overall trend for this particular item is bearish (price keeps falling) as seen on the 6 month price graph on the left.

So, how do you know which item to flip? More importantly, how do you know whether or not the value of an item is going to increase in the future so you can sell it for profit? The Grand Exchange Market Watch has made this incredibly easy for us!

The Grand Exchange Market Watch

Jagex has been kind enough to launch the official market watch for all the tradable items on Runescape and because we now know how price has behaved in the past, it’s easy to predict a possible future scenario just by looking “into the past”. This is how you do it:

You are now looking at the flipping items list or the top 100 most traded items and this is obviously where the money is. But hold on! We can’t just start flipping any random item from this list. What if the item we pick is losing value over time just like iron ore?

How to spot an item that is likely to increase in value over time?

Basically you will need to find a graph that is showing clear signs of a bull market (a market condition where the overall price is moving up).

Frost Dragon bones are the perfect example of a good bullish item. Notice the huge red arrow? It points to a trend line indicator (gentle light blue line) which is very important for us. Don’t forget to activate it!

Take a look at this graph. What do you see? The yellow line, which is the main price, keeps making higher lows (look at the green stars I drew).

A “low” is the lowest point a price has reached in a downward move. When a price makes a low and the next low is higher than the previous, it’s an indication of a bull market (overall upward movement).

As long as this is happening ABOVE the trend line we are good, but the moment the yellow price line crosses the blue trend line, things get icky and it’s advised to stop flipping these items.

Know when to stay away flipping items

When the price line (yellow) and trend line (blue) cross and the “mouth” of the chart is pointing in the downward direction, it’s most likely a sign of further downward movement as shown here on the 3 month chart of Dragon Bones.

I have drawn the red lines to emphasize the downward pointing mouth. Whenever you see something like this- stay away!

However if the mouth is opening upwards, it’s a strong sign of further upward movement. If the mouth opens and points up in a downward trend, it can even mean a trend reversal in which case you can try to flip, but cautiously.

Items with no apparent trendand sudden drops and spikes in the price can mean a lot of things, but it most certainly doesn’t mean it’s a safe item to flip.

The Spirit Shard on a 1 Month time scale is a great example of items to avoid. Such a strange behavior could be a malicious Runescape merchanting clan trying to manipulate the price or it can even mean that at some point Jagex is giving more of the item away freely on treasure hunter. In any case if you see an item like this then skip it.

Go, start flipping items on Runescape!

That’s it for today! I hope I have provided at least some insight into the world of Runescape money making using the grand exchange for flipping items. Once you get the hang of it, it will become the easiest thing you’ll ever do in this game.

If you want to speculate on an item or simply need some advice, feel free to add me in game. My username is y n e f (spaces between letters).

Bitcoin in the year 2014

We started out strong this year! After the traditional years end selling marathon where the BTC fell from its highest point yet, the $1200 area, we quickly recovered in January 2014 from $600 all the way up to $1000 again. Investors were confident that Bitcoin is the new goldmine.

The media coverage

It’s no surprise that the media was creating a fuss about Bitcoin considering that BTC is a commodity that suddenly exploded from $100 to $1200 in just a few weeks. Everybody was talking about Bitcoin in 2014. People were creating new businesses that solely relied on Bitcoin as a currency and even the government, the banks and the IRS were taking Bitcoin seriously. All this controversial publicity reflects nicely on the charts as well- it’s almost as if BTC became alive! Heck, even PayPal added limited support for Bitcoin.

What goes up, must come down

Surely something that suddenly rises to such heights must come down eventually and chill for a while to balance things out. This is exactly what happened throughout the year 2014, the BTC/USD gradually came down from the high losing the hard on it had from all the media fuss.

What to expect from 2015

If you look at the yearly chart (above) you can see that we are currently at the lowest point yet ever since this whole madness started back in 2013. Because we are getting closer and closer to years end a lot of investors are raking in profits for a fresh start next year so the mass selling of BTC right now seems pretty normal to me. I am kind of disappointed to see that we broke through a nice solid support level in the $320 area though. Looking at this makes me believe that the maximum buying potential for BTC in 2015 shouldn’t get us higher than $600, maybe $750. It will need some serious super powers to get past that point.

Right now we are probably going lower from here as the years end is creeping closer and closer so don’t get too crazy when you wake up one morning and find that BTC is worth only $250. The $320 area support level was a serious breaking point and there’s nothing left to stop the selling any more other than the deliciously low price itself which will surely get investors back to buying, especially in the first month of 2015.

One day my sister came to me and said that her phone, the Samsung Galaxy S II, could no longer be charged. Something was apparently wrong with the charger port because when I held the cable at a right angle the phone lit up for a brief moment. Because the warranty was still valid I suggested my father to take the phone to the local shop where the phone was purchased and have them fix it… and this is where things got really stupid!

First he had to pay 20EUR in order to have them look at the phone. I figured out what was wrong with the phone in a few minutes, but it took them 2 days to finally call and say that the motherboard needed to be replaced and that the warranty would not cover it because they had concluded that my sister had broken it and it was no accident.

When my father asked how much will it cost to have the motherboard replaced, the tech guy gave a solid answer- 180 EUR. Obviously he didn’t pay for it because he had already paid them 20 EUR for looking at the phone and now they were asking 180 EUR more- the phone isn’t even worth that much as new!

While my little sis ended up with a cool new phone I decided to not give up and try to fix the Galaxy S II myself. How hard could it be?! So I opened up the phone and looked inside… I saw that the part of the motherboard that had a charger port could actually be easily disconnected from the main board. Upon closer examination I found some product serial numbers on it that I typed into eBay and this is what I found:

I was shocked to see that the total cost for this part was just $2,66 USD. I couldn’t believe it was the only thing broken in the phone, but I placed an order just in case… I just HAD to try myself!

After about a month of waiting (item came directly from China) it finally arrived in the mailbox. I carefully removed the old one from the phone and connected the connector leaving it all open on the table just for the sake of testing it out… I was nervous a little… I carefully connected the charger to the phone… and IT WORKED! The phone started charging immediately.

What the… The professional tech support that we trusted would have taken 180 EUR (total of 200 EUR) for this? Wow… just wow. This is the last time I take anything to these guys. This experience inspired me to write this post and propose an idea what to do the next time a gadget of yours breaks down. Here it is.

PROPER way of dealing with broken gadgets

1. Try to fix it yourself

First of all analyze the situation. Try to understand what’s wrong and then try to fix it yourself with the knowledge you already have.

2. Learn how to fix it yourself

If you don’t know how to fix it at first, try to learn more about the device. How it works, what parts are required etc. It’s a fun way of learning something new!

3. Take it to someone who CAN fix it

If all else fails and you can’t fix it yourself you should probably take it to someone who can fix it. Try to find a tech nerd instead of a corporation though. Apparently they’re after profits and show little interest in actually helping you.

4. Recycle it

Sometimes things just die and there’s nothing you can do about it. If your nerd tech friend couldn’t fix it perhaps it’s time to say goodbye. Make sure to take it to a recycling center so it would be reused to make something nice.

In the monetary system people will rip you off

It sucks, but it’s true. Just like these tech support guys were after a gigantic profit you can easily get ripped off by anyone who values money highly. Remember, money is just paper. It doesn’t mean anything. I didn’t fix the phone with money… I fixed it with a spare part. Sure, it cost me $2,66 because we’re living in a monetary system, but you get the general idea 🙂

I definitely support The Venus Project and a resource based economy where money is simply obsolete and knowledge and a better understanding of how things work are the truly valuable commodities.

Flipping items is not rocket science

Despite what a lot of players think, flipping items is actually pretty simple and straightforward. The idea is to generate a profit by buying items below the average market price and after a while selling these items above the average market price (the buy low, sell high principle that works with any business).

Best items for flipping in the Grand Exchange

Before getting started you should understand that you can’t flip everything. Certain items are simply losing their value all the time, thus making them literally a black hole for your gold coins.

Then there are items that simply won’t sell only at certain times. The Santa Hat, for example, doesn’t sell in the middle of July etc.

Finding profitable items for flipping in GE

The easiest way to find a profitable item is to look for items that are in great demand such as things that are directly linked to skilling. For example herbs, seeds, ores, etc. are all required and in great demand because players are always trying to level up their skills using these items.

After you have chosen your item, it’s time to take a look at the price graph to make sure your items overall price trend is upwards, not downwards. You don’t want to end up with stuff that are clearly losing their value. To do that we simply enter our item name + grand exchange into Google search, for example “iron bar grand exchange”.

Now that the graph is displayed we can clearly see that the Iron Bar has an overall upward trend. You have to look at the entire graph, not just the last (right side) tip of the graph to understand where the trend is going.

If you don’t understand graphs that well there are plenty of tutorials and guides available online about how to properly analyze graphs and how to spot trends in the price movement. It’s really interesting stuff so I recommend looking into it! 😉

After analyzing the market we have finally chosen which item to flip – for this guide, it’s the Iron Bar used mainly in the Smithing skill to make weapons, armor, arrow tips and nails.

The first thing we do is called a test buy. We simply buy one of the Iron Bars and put in a higher price than the average market price to make sure our item buys instantly. This is how we know exactly what the current price of our item is.

As you can see on the picture to the left we entered 567 gp as the price we wanted to buy, but the item actually bought for 566 gp giving us back the change of 1 gp.

We now know that 566 gp is the actual price that Iron Bars are going for in the Grand Exchange at this moment.

Remember the price graph? The trend is clearly upwards so we are pretty confident that we can sell the Iron Bar back to the market for a higher price than 566 gp.

Picking the right price for selling

The trick is to put the item up for sale and increase its price by five percent. To do that simply click on the +5% button and Grand Exchange will automatically adjust your selling price.

But that’s not the price we want to sell because a lot of other people are probably doing the same.

We need to target the “Desperate buyer” who rushes to GE and makes a buy order immediately with +5% without worrying much about market prices. These type of players just want to receive the item as fast as possible so they can go skilling and advance their levels.

In order to sell to these players the price must be adjusted in a way that it’s still above the overall market price, but below the +5% price. When we adjust our selling price in this way, we make sure the desperate buyer will buy from us first. Makes sense?

Instead of trying to sell for 595 gp (the +5%) we are lowering the price to 577 gp aiming for a quick 11 gp profit per Iron Bar.

As you can see just a few moments later someone had bought our Iron Bar for 577 gp! I am sure if we waited long enough, we could sell it for 595+ as well, because the general price for Iron Bar is currently climbing. For now let’s settle with just 11 gp profit per Iron Bar.

Now we just have to repeat this process and buy 5000 Iron Bars giving us a good 55,000 profit flipping the Iron Bar.

Valuable items = More profits!

The Iron Bar in our example isn’t a valuable item and because of this the profits are smaller too. If you want to make more money flipping items on the Grand Exchange you just have to buy and sell things that cost more. The price difference is bigger there and so are your profits.

NB! I advise you to invest only 10-20% of your entire capital into flipping. This way you can safely trade without losing your entire cash pile should the trend change and prices fall.